Part 3
Eugenius Philalethes enlarges on the infinite capacity of our spiritual nature and on the power of our soul’s imagination. “She has an absolute power in miraculous and more than natural transmutations,” and he clothes his doctrine of human evolution in the terminology of alchemical adepts.
In one of the twelve treatises attributed to Sendivogius, there are the following remarkable passages:--“We know the composition of man in all respects, yet we cannot infuse the soul, which is out of the course of nature. Nature does not work before there be material given unto her....” The problem that all composites are subject to dissolution, and that man is composed of the four elements, and how, therefore, he could have been immortal in Paradise, is considered thus. “Paradise was and is a place created of the most pure elements, and of these man also was formed, and thus was consecrated to perpetuity of life. After his fall, he was driven into the corruptible elementated world, and nourished by corruptible elementated elements, which infected his past nature and generated disease and death. To the original creation of man in state immortal the ancient philosophers have likened their stone, and this immortality caused them to seek the stone, desiring to find the incorruptible elements which entered into the Adamic constitution. To them the Most High God revealed that a composition of such elements was in gold, for in animals it could not be had, seeing they must preserve their lives by corrupt elements; in vegetables also it is not, because in them is an inequality of the elements. And seeing all created things are inclined to multiplication, the philosophers propounded to themselves that they would make tryal of the possibility of nature in this mineral kingdom, which being discovered, they saw that THERE WERE INNUMERABLE OTHER SECRETS IN NATURE, OF WHICH, AS OF DIVINE SECRETS, THEY WROTE SPARINGLY.”
Here the reference probably intended is to the possibilities which their theory revealed for other than the mineral kingdoms, a theory the truth of which they believed themselves to have demonstrated by accomplishing metallic transmutation. In this connection, it should be noticed that the philosophical stone was generally considered a universal medicine--a medicine for metals and man, the latter, of course, by inference.
The occasional presence of these possibilities in the minds of adepts, and the comprehensive nature of the Hermetic theory, fully explain the aberrations of mystical commentators, who have mistaken the side issues for the end in view, not altogether inexcusably, because the end in view sinks into complete unimportance when compared with the side issues, and all that is of value in alchemy for the modern student of occultism is comprised in these same possibilities, in the application of the Hermetic theory to the supreme subject, Man. It is impossible within the limits of a brief introduction to do justice to an illimitable subject, to the art of psychic transmutation, to the spiritual alchemistry, the principles of which are contained in the arcane theory of the adepts, and which principles are by no means dependent for their truth on the actuality of metallic transmutation, so I must confine myself to a few general observations.
The admirable lesson which we may learn of the alchemists is the exaltation of things in virtue beyond the unassisted ability of Nature. Such exaltation is possible, according to the adepts, both within and without the metallic kingdom. Man and the animals are alike included by this comprehensive theory of development, and it is therefore conceivable that a few of the Hermetic symbolists taught in their secret and allegorical fashion the method of alchemical procedure when man was the subject, and revealed the miraculous results of this labour in the typewritten books which they bequeathed to posterity. That Henry Khunrath was in search of the transmutation of metals up to a certain point and period is, I think, very clearly indicated by his visit to Dr Dee. That the _Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ_, which was published in 1609, treats of a spiritual alchemy, is, however, evidenced by the nature of its symbols and by the general tenor of the strange esoteric commentary on some of the Hebrew psalms. Those who worked in metals may, or may not, have failed; it is by no means a point of importance to the discriminating student of occultism; but they have left behind them a theory which is wholly true in its application to that one substance in Nature which we know to be capable of indefinite perfectibility, and the splendour and glory of the accomplished _Magnum Opus_, when the young King issues from the Everlasting East, from the land of the Morning and of Paradise,
“Bearing the crescent moon upon his crest,”
though it be a dream--say even, which no one can actually affirm--though it be an impossibility for the metal, is true for the man; and all that is beautiful and sublime in alchemical symbolism may be rigorously applied to the divine flower of the future, the young King of Humanity, the perfect youth to come, when he issues from the Spiritual East, in the dawn of the genuine truth, bearing the Crescent Moon, the woman of the future, upon his bright and imperial crest.
I am of opinion, from the evidence in hand, that metallic transmutations did occur in the past. They were phenomena as rare as a genuine “materialisation” of so-called spirits is generally considered at the present day among those believers in physical mediumship who have not been besotted by credulity and the glamour of a world of wonders. Like modern spiritualism, the isolated facts of veritable alchemy are enveloped in a crowd of discreditable trickery, and the trade of an adept in the past was as profitable, and as patronised by princes, as that of modern dealers with familiar spirits.
But the fact of an occasional transmutation gives little reason to suppose that the _praxis alchemiæ_ in metallic subjects is ever likely to succeed with modern students of the _turba philosophorum_. The enigmas of the alchemists admit, as I have said, of manifold interpretations. Their recipes are too vague and confused to be followed. They insist themselves that their art can only be learned by a direct revelation from God, or by the tuition of a master. Their fundamental secrets have not only been never revealed in their multitudinous treatises, but they scarcely pretend to reveal them, despite the magnificent assurances which are sometimes contained in their titles. The practical side of alchemy must be surrendered to specialists in chemistry, working quite independently of the books or the methods of the philosophers. Only the theory is of value to neophytes, or initiates, or to any student of the higher occultism; and it is of value, as I have said, because it can be applied outside the kingdom of metals, as the alchemists themselves acknowledge, and as some of them seem to have attempted.
The psychic method of interpretation as propounded in the “Suggestive Inquiry” exalted the seekers for the philosophical stone into hierophants of the mystery of God; it endowed them with the _altitudo divitiarum sapientiæ et scientiæ Dei_. They had crossed the threshold of eternity; they had solved the absolute; they had seen Diana unveiled; they had raised the cincture of Isis, and had devoured her supernatural beauties--that is, they had accomplished the manifestation of the incarnate spirit of man, and had invested it with deific glory. They did not grope after physical secrets; they did not investigate, with Paracelsus, the properties of ordure and other matter in putrefaction; they did not work with mercury and sulphur; they did not distil wine; they did not decoct egg-shells. They were soul seekers, and they had found the soul; they were artificers, and they had adorned the soul; they were alchemists, and had transmuted it. Sublime and romantic hypothesis! But we know that they worked in metals; we know that they manipulated minerals; we know that they ransacked every kingdom of nature for substances which, by a bare possibility, through some happy guess, might really transform the baser metals into gold. They were often extravagant in their views, they were generally absurd in their methods; they seldom found their end, but, judged as they actually were, stripped of all glamour and romance, self-educated seekers into Nature at the dawn of a physical science, they are eminently entitled to our respect, because, in the first place, unenlightened and unequipped, with their bare hands, they laid the foundations of a providential and life-saving knowledge, and in the second, because their furnaces were erected, intellectually, “on a peak in Darien”--that is, they worked in accordance with a theory which had an unknown field of application, and through the smoke of their coals and their chemicals they beheld illimitable vistas where the groaning totality of Nature developed its internal resources, and advanced by degrees to perfection, upon lines which were quite in accordance with their vision of mineral culture. “A depth beyond the depth, and a height beyond the height,” were thus revealed to them, and their glimpses of these glorious possibilities transfigured their strange terminology, and illuminated their barbarous symbolism.
Eliminating obviously worthless works, the speculations of needy impostors and disreputable publishers, it is from those who have least contributed to the advancement of chemical science that we must seek information concerning the spiritual chemistry--those who have elaborated the theory rather than those who exclusively expound the practice. In all cases, we shall do well to reflect that the object in view was metals, except in such rare instances as are presented by Henry Khunrath and the anonymous author of the treatise concerning Mary of Alexandria, with a few Rosicrucian philosophers. We must read them for what they suggest, and not for what they had in view.
The dream of the psycho-chemistry is a grand and sublime scheme of absolute reconstruction by means of the Paracelsian _Orizon Æternitatis_, or supercelestial virtue of things, the divinisation, or deification, in the narrower sense, of man the triune by an influx from above. It supposes that the transmutation or transfiguration of man can be accomplished while he is on this earth and in this body, which then would be magically draped _in splendoribus sanctorum_. The Morning Star is the inheritance of every man, and the woman of the future will be clothed with the sun, and Luna shall be set beneath her feet. The blue mantle typifies the mystical sea, her heritage of illimitable vastness. These marvels may be really accomplished by the cleansing of the two-fold human tabernacle, the holy house of life, and by the progressive evolution into outward and visible manifestation of the infinite potencies within it.
In the facts and possibilities of mesmerism and in the phenomena of ecstatic clairvoyance, in ancient magic and modern spiritualism, in the doctrines and experiences of religious regeneration, we must seek the _raison d’être_ of the sublime dream of psycho-chemistry--that, namely, there is a change, a transmutation, or a new birth, possible to embodied man which shall manifestly develop the esotoric potencies of his spiritual being, so that the flesh itself shall be purged, clarified, glorified, and clothed upon by the essential light of the divine pneuma. Those of my readers who are interested in this absorbing subject I must refer to a work entitled, “AZOTH, OR THE STAR IN THE EAST,” which, I trust, will be ready for publication early in 1889, and which will treat of the First Matter of the _Magnum Opus_, of the evolution of Aphrodite Urania, of the supernatural generation of the Son of the Sun, and of the alchemical transfiguration of humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] There is no need to suppose a metonymy. The conscience is a guide which education easily perverts. Therefore, supposing it to be really the _instrument_ of the alchemists, it may eminently stand in need of purification, and, except in the most general matters, is at best an uncertain guide.
[B] “L’Alchimie et les Alchimistes,” p. 93.
ON THE PHYSICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE MAGNUM OPUS.
The physical theory of transmutation is based on the composite character of metals, on their generation in the bowels of the earth, and on the existence in nature of a pure and penetrating matter which applied to any substance exalts and perfects it after its own kind. This matter is called THE LIGHT by Eugenius Philalethes and by numerous other writers. In its application to animals, it exalts animals; in its application to vegetables, it exalts vegetables, while metals and minerals, after the same manner, are refined and translated from the worst to the best condition.
All the elements which enter into the composition of metals are identical, but they differ in proportion and in purity. In the metallic kingdom, the object of nature is invariably to create gold. The production of the baser metals is an accident of the process, or the result of an unfavourable environment.
The generation of metals in the earth is a point of great importance, and must be well studied by the amateur, for without this, and the faithful imitation of Nature, he will never achieve anything successful. It is by means of the seed of metals that their generation takes place. Their composite character indicates their transmutable quality. Such transmutation is accomplished by means of the philosophical stone, and this stone is, in fact, the combination of the male and female seeds which beget gold and silver. Now the matters or elements of this stone, and the _prima materia_ above all, are concealed by a multitude of symbols, false and allegorical descriptions, and evasive or deceptive names.
According to Baron Tschoudy, all who have written on the art have concealed the true name of the _prima materia_ because it is the chief key of chemistry. Its discovery is generally declared to be impossible without a special illumination from God, but the sages who receive this divine favour and distinction have occasionally perpetuated its knowledge by the instruction of suitable pupils under the pledge of inviolable secresy. The author of _L’Étoile Flamboyante_ supplies an immense list of the names which have been applied to this mysterious substance under one or other of its phases. “As those that sail between Scylla and Charybdis are in danger on both sides,” says D’Espagnet, “unto no less hazard are they subject, who, pursuing the prey of the golden fleece, are carried between the uncertain rocks of the philosophers’ sulphur and mercury. The more acute, by their constant reading of grave and credible authors, and by the irradiant sun, have attained unto the knowledge of sulphur, but are at a stand in the entrance of the philosophers’ mercury, for writers have twisted it with so many windings and meanders, and involved it with so many equivocal names, that it may be sooner met with by the force of the seeker’s intellect than be found by reason or toil.”
The _prima materia_ has been defined as a fifth element, or quintessence, the material alpha and omega, the soul of the elements, living mercury, regenerated mercury, a metallic soul, &c. It is designated by such allegorical names as the Bird of Hermes, the Virgin’s Son, the Son of the Sun and Moon, the Virgin’s Head, Azoth, &c.
Where it appears to be seriously described the adepts are in continual contradiction, but it is generally allowed to be a substance found everywhere and continually seen and possessed by those who are ignorant of its virtues. “Although some persons,” says Urbiger, “possessed with foolish notions, dream that the first matter is to be found only in some particular places, at such and such times of the year, and by the virtue of a magical magnet, yet we are most certain, according to our divine master, Hermes, that all these suppositions being false, it is to be found everywhere, at all times, and only by our science.”[C]
In similar terms, we are told by the “Commentary on the Ancient War of the Knights,” that the matter of the art, so precious by the excellent gifts wherewith Nature has enriched it, is truly mean with regard to the substances from which it derives its original. “Its price is not above the ability of the poor. Tenpence is more than sufficient to purchase the Matter of the Stone.... The matter is mean, considering the foundation of the art, because it costs very little; it is no less mean if one considers exteriorly that which gives it perfection, since in that regard it costs nothing at all, in as much as _all the world has it in its power_, says Cosmopolite, so that it is a constant truth that the stone is a thing mean in one sense but most precious in another, and that there are none but fools that despise it, by a just judgment of God.”
The same authority assures us, with regard to the actual nature of the _prima materia_, that it is one only and self-same thing, although it is a natural compound of certain substances from one root and of one kind, forming together one whole complete homogeneity. The substances that make up the philosophical compound differ less among themselves than sorrel water differs from lettuce water. Urbiger asserts that the true and real matter is only “a vapour impregnated with the metallic seed, yet undetermined, created by God Almighty, generated by the concurrence and influence of the astrums, contained in the bowels of the earth, as the matrix of all created things.” In conformity with this, one earlier writer, Sir George Ripley, describes the stone as the potential vapour of metals. It is normally invisible, but may be made to manifest as a clear water. So also Philalethes cries in his inspired way:--“Hear me, and I shall disclose the secret, which like a rose has been guarded by thorns, so that few in past times could pull the flower. There is a substance of a metalline species, which looks so cloudy that the universe will have nothing to do with it. Its visible form is vile; it defiles metalline bodies, and no one can readily imagine that the pearly drink of bright Phœbus should spring from thence. Its components are a most pure and tender mercury, a dry incarcerate sulphur, which binds it and restrains fluxation.... Know this subject, it is the sure basis of all our secrets.... To deal plainly, it is the child of Saturn, of mean price and great venom.... It is not malleable, though metalline. Its colour is sable with, with intermixed argent, which mark the sable field with veins of glittering argent.”[D]
The poisonous nature of the stone is much insisted on by numerous philosophers. “Its substance and its vapour are indeed a poison which the philosophers should know how to change into an antidote by preparation and direction.”[E]
No descriptions, supplied _ad infinitum_ by the numberless adepts who were moved by unselfish generosity to expound the arcana of alchemy, for the spiritual, intellectual, and physical enrichment of those who deserved initiation, expose the true nature of the _prima materia_, while the _vas philosophorum_ in which it is contained and digested is described in contradictory terms, and is by some writers declared a divine secret.
Given the matter of the stone and also the necessary vessel, the processes which must be then undertaken to accomplish the _magnum opus_ are described with moderate perspicuity. There is the Calcination or purgation of the stone, in which kind is worked with kind for the space of a philosophical year. There is Dissolution which prepares the way for congelation, and which is performed during the black state of the mysterious matter. It is accomplished by water which does not wet the hand. There is the Separation of the subtle and the gross, which is to be performed by means of heat. In the Conjunction which follows, the elements are duly and scrupulously combined. Putrefaction afterwards takes place,
“Without which pole no seed may multiply.”
Then in the subsequent Congelation the white colour appears, which is one of the signs of success. It becomes more pronounced in Cibation. In Sublimation the body is spiritualised, the spirit made corporeal, and again a more glittering whiteness is apparent. Fermentation afterwards fixes together the alchemical earth and water, and causes the mystic medicine to flow like wax. The matter is then augmented with the alchemical spirit of life, and the Exaltation of the philosophic earth is accomplished by the natural rectification of its elements. When these processes have been successfully completed, the mystic stone will have passed through three chief stages characterised by different colours, black, white, and red, after which it is capable of infinite multiplication, and when projected on mercury, it will absolutely transmute it, the resulting gold bearing every test. The base metals made use of must be purified to insure the success of the operation. The process for the manufacture of silver is essentially similar, but the resources of the matter are not carried to so high a degree.
According to the “Commentary on the Ancient War of the Knights,” the transmutations performed by the perfect stone are so absolute that no trace remains of the original metal. It cannot, however, destroy gold, nor exalt it into a more perfect metallic substance; it, therefore, transmutes it into a medicine a thousand times superior to any virtues which can be extracted from it in its vulgar state. This medicine becomes a most potent agent in the exaltation of base metals.
Among the incidental properties of the perfect mineral agent is the conversion of flints into precious stones, but the manufacture of gold and of jewels is generally declared to be the least of the philosophical secrets, for the spirit which informs the mysterious _prima materia_ of the great and sublime work can be variously used and adapted to the attainment of absolute perfection in all the “liberal sciences,” the possession of the “whole wisdom of nature, and of things more secret and extraordinary than is the gift of prophecy which Rhasis and Bono assert to be contained in the red stone.”
FOOTNOTES:
[C] Baro Urbigerus--“One Hundred Aphorisms demonstrating the preparation of the Grand Elixir.”
[D] Aphorismi Urbigerani.
[E] Commentary on the “Ancient War of the Knights.”
LIVES OF THE ALCHEMISTS.
GEBER.
The first, and, according to the general concensus of Hermetic authorities, the prince of those alchemical adepts who have appeared during the Christian era, was the famous Geber, Giaber, or Yeber, whose true name was Abou Moussah Djafar al Sofi, and who was a native of Haman, in Mesopotamia, according to the more probable opinion. He is also said to have been a Greek, a Spanish Arabian born at Seville, and a Persian of Thus. Romance represents him as an illuminated monarch of India. According to Aboulfeda, he flourished during the eighth century, but later and earlier periods have been also suggested. His life is involved in hopeless obscurity; but his experiments upon metals, undertaken with a view to the discovery of their constituent elements and the degrees of their fusibility, led him to numerous discoveries both in chemistry and in medicine, including suroxydised muriate of mercury, red oxyde of mercury, and nitric acid. “It is thus that Hermetic philosophy gave rise to chemistry,” says a writer in the _Biographie Universelle_, “and that the reputation of Geber is permanently established, not upon his search for an impossible chimera, but for his discovery of truths founded on actual experience.”